Compgun takes the work out of figuring out sales commissions for your business

In the United States, companies spend more than $800 billion each year on salesforce compensation, making it one of the largest marketing investments for any enterprise business. But the ways for managing this model are antiquated and time-consuming, which makes it prime for a drastic shift. Compgun is banking on that, launching a service today to transform sales commission in a manner similar to what Gusto has done with payroll.

“We’re trying to create the first sales commission software that everyone can love,” CTO Tim Sze told VentureBeat. Compgun functions as a self-serve platform with companies being onboarded in less than a day.

Founded by Sze and CEO Jake Seip, this Y Combinator-backed startup allows its customers to build, test, and administer their commission structures for salespeople. It also provides real-time analytics that lets you monitor individual performance and team rankings. Customized dashboards and graphs are also available in the subscription platform. Compgun will host your sales data and metrics, which it uses to build intermediate calculations and goals for your team to keep track of.

The founders are longtime friends, and when they started a previous business together, they discovered that sales commission is a giant pain point for businesses.

“Most companies are managing this in email and Excel,” Sze explained.

Its name is an homage to Mailgun, the transactional email API service for developers. Seip said that the premise is to make a compensation service as easy as shooting emails to people.

Compgun offers two pricing tiers, depending on how many people are enrolled. It charges $25 per user per month for organizations with fewer than 25 people and $35 per user per month for those with more than that, with no commission on top of that. It’s looking to appeal to sales representatives, managers, and administrators.

So what’s to stop a company like Salesforce from entering the market and dominating the sales commission space? Seip said that right now it’s difficult for the enterprise cloud company to do so because it doesn’t have any native commission built in. “It’s a great CRM and a great way to house relationship data,” he said, but “if you want to calculate commissions, you need something with the scale and the ability to analyze in real-time.”

Sze said that Compgun offers an integration with Salesforce and will also pair with internal SQL databases; it can pull data through FTP sync, and an API feed is in the works.

The company said that it has over $400,000 in booked annual revenue run rate with companies such as Optimizely, Intercom, and Shopkeep POS. Seip said that the number of companies Compgun works with is in the “low double-digits,” but is calculating commissions for “hundreds and hundreds” of sales reps. Since joining Y Combinator this season, it claims to have increased bookings by 50 percent.